Introducing Niche: the social media startup that connects top-ranking content creators to brands

You don’t have to be a veteran content manager to appreciate that when a social media startup bags $550,000 dollars in seed funding less than six months after being founded, it’s likely to be pretty darned hot. And that’s the reputation that New York-based Niche is clearly very happy to be building.

Talent meets brands

Co-founded in June this year by Darren Lachtman and Rob Fishman (erstwhile social media editor at The Huffington Post), Niche connects its community of influential, popular social media creators with leading brands to help the latter “supercharge their social presences”.

The more questioning content manager may be wondering how Niche can stand out from the crowd when more established outfits like Adly have been making money from celebrity-fueled social media marketing campaigns for some years now. But to date, Niche creators between them reach a 75 million-strong collective audience. Impressive stuff.

Creators get a profile that pulls together all their accounts and content from other social networks. They also get analytics which show them what content is engaging people (and what isn’t). All for free of course; and they get to make some money if they take part in marketing campaigns.

The analytics gives valuable insights to marketers too, who can scan leaderboards displaying the most popular Niche creators. With a little help from Niche, they can link up with them and develop campaigns.

The human touch

Niche creators, according to Fishman, have mindshare but lack traditional sales structures. And, he says, Niche’s brand partners “are dying to work with these people, but they don’t know how.” Although the startup focused initially on Vine, it now extends to all major social networks, including Twitter and Facebook, and it will add others as they gain traction.

Niche has a glittering and growing list of partner brands on board now, including Gap, CBS Films and Relativity, but it also has plenty of startups signing up, such as Handybook, Blue Apron and Lyft. The campaign it helped run for Relativity’s film “Romeo and Juliet” is credited with increasing the movie’s social media following by thousands of users.

Fishman says “The human touch is very important to us” and content managers will see why: the company takes a highly customized, hands-on approach to every campaign.